Diary - David Hare
Published 29 September 2003
Oswald Mosley was held to be a dangerous orator, but did people take that voice seriously? Will future generations believe we listened to Margaret Thatcher and didn't just laugh?
All summer, I've been listening to the British Library's CDs of the voices of writers born in the 19th century. Tennyson reciting "The Charge of the Light Brigade" makes your hair stand on end. Simon Hoggart has remarked that Nicole Kidman would have made herself ridiculous in The Hours had she played Virginia Woolf using the real accent. True. Woolf gets 35 vowels into the word "mysterious". But the actor did indeed listen to this very recording, and faced a familiar problem - likeliness versus authenticity. After the Second World War, SOE agents who had been flown into France acted themselves in the reconstructed documentary Now It Can Be Told. When I ran the film as background research for Plenty, then the cast, even 25 years ago, roared with laughter. How could these brave men and women have passed as French when they talked so toffee? Oswald Mosley was held to be a dangerous orator. But how could people take him seriously? Talking like that? Could you? Will future generations believe we listened to Margaret Thatcher and didn't just laugh?
Particularly moving is Rudyard Kipling, who observes that there is no hierarchy in the kingdom of letters. All writers are equals because no one can know who will survive. That said, things do seem to be particularly cruel for the only-just-dead. It's excellent news that Susannah Capon is planning a biography of the great television playwright David Mercer. With the death of John Schlesinger, nearly everyone who made half-decent British films during my adolescence - Jack Clayton, Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson - is gone. Stephen Frears, who has done as much for British cinema as anyone alive, said to me the other day: "It's our only job now, to make sure the ones who inspired us aren't forgotten." Why can't the BBC re-show Mercer's work? All its propaganda about "quality" - shorthand for "give us the money" - is soup made from the bones of dramatists like Mercer. Shouldn't we honour the dead?
Was everyone else downcast after reading Nobody's Perfect, Anthony Lane's doorstep collection from the New Yorker? Lane is the rare film reviewer who's worth seeking out weekly, but piled-up arts criticism induces only listlessness and malaise. Somehow, the better you are at it, the more annoying it becomes. In Lane's case, all that wit and insight gets awfully tiring, and, what's more, beside the point. Pauline Kael was as brilliant as Lane, but I remember reading the single most depressing critical sentence ever written "Citizen Kane is a masterpiece, but finally it is a shallow masterpiece" and thinking "Well, thanks a bunch. Is that all the job finally adds up to? The desire, in a single phrase, to take away from a work of art all the pleasure it has hitherto given?" It's hard to talk about art without spoiling it, and in my lifetime only wise, oblique women like Nancy Banks-Smith have managed it. My university tutor, Raymond Williams, mindful of the problem, used to round off his books by throwing in a play of his own - in the case of Koba: a tragedy, famously unfathomable. But good for him.
James Wood is an example of the powerfully intelligent critic who gets everything wrong. About the novel, and the notion that it mustn't be about anything but relationships and God, he's just wrong. But he, like Raymond, has now written a fiction, to suitably hushed reviews. In his critical writing, Wood displays a modish literary distaste for the stage. "The crowds, darling, the collaborators!" Yet when he nominates his favourite writers, Wood can't bring himself to mention the only thing they have in common. You want to say to him: "Ducky, chances are, there's a good reason Shakespeare and Chekhov chose to be playwrights. They're not great writers who happened to work in the theatre. They're writers who achieved their greatest because they worked in the theatre. Go figure."
An appeal to readers. I've always believed that George Orwell wrote that just because something is in the Daily Telegraph doesn't mean it's not true. A computer check on the collected works did not back me up. Can anyone help?
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